Benefits of SSD

I know that SSD's make boot time and launching apps quicker. What else would i notice? I have a imac so I won't be saving much to my mbpro. Does it still make sense to get one? I mostly will use it for light gaming, internet, ms office, iphoto, imovie, etc.

Staff Member

Games load faster, iPhoto will be much faster (assuming all pics are in SSD) and everything that requires disk access will be faster. I have one in my MBA but in basic usage, there isn't much difference when I compare it to my iMac.

Almost in everything you do you access the harddrive, and this is quicker with SSD.
Of course you will notice it less on an iMac compared to a laptop as the harddrive in an iMac is spinning faster than in a laptop.
How much sense it makes depends on your economy.

You basically covered the main parts with the boot time and app launching. Honestly, I have played with a MBA and while the speed is pretty impressive, I don't find it a big enough difference from my 7200 RPM HDD to justify the cost. I'm sure the 15-20 sec. boot time is awesome, but I can deal with the 45 second boot once a day (if that). Then again, I am a college student, and don't have the money for a decent size SSD even if I wanted one.

Those are all good points as well. An SSD will survive an impact 3 to 4 times what it would take to break a hard drive while it's operating. It'll be about 1.5 times more robust if the hard drive is off (going by max g shock).

You basically covered the main parts with the boot time and app launching. Honestly, I have played with a MBA and while the speed is pretty impressive, I don't find it a big enough difference from my 7200 RPM HDD to justify the cost. I'm sure the 15-20 sec. boot time is awesome, but I can deal with the 45 second boot once a day (if that). Then again, I am a college student, and don't have the money for a decent size SSD even if I wanted one.

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This. I find that the battery difference should be negligible considering the already long battery life of the current macbook pros. The impact fro 3 - 4 times the impact of a hard drive is great but consider what will happen to the rest of the mac if it falls from that height...

The impact fro 3 - 4 times the impact of a hard drive is great but consider what will happen to the rest of the mac if it falls from that height...

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The machine can be replaced though. The data...well...
Considering people don't backup as often as they should, And the heart wrenching "click of death" that oft ensues after a single careless drop of a machine even if it "didn't fall very far".

This. I find that the battery difference should be negligible considering the already long battery life of the current macbook pros. The impact fro 3 - 4 times the impact of a hard drive is great but consider what will happen to the rest of the mac if it falls from that height...

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Excellent points. Plus with the battery, most SSDs use nearly as much energy as an HDD anyhow, plus they use more CPU as well, resulting in roughly equal battery life.

The machine can be replaced though. The data...well...
Considering people don't backup as often as they should, And the heart wrenching "click of death" that oft ensues after a single careless drop of a machine even if it "didn't fall very far".

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That is true... though if you could afford to replace the macbook pro, then you would be able to afford an SSD no doubt...

Anyways, I forgot the most impressive feature of an SSD - you can open exactly 123,234,345,456 applications in under a second!!!!
/sarcasm

Sorry to hijack the thread. Would a SSD help the performance of parallels or VM ware in OSX?Other than booting faster that is..How significant the improvement would be? I couldn't find much comment about this, so any idea?

this. I find that the battery difference should be negligible considering the already long battery life of the current macbook pros. The impact fro 3 - 4 times the impact of a hard drive is great but consider what will happen to the rest of the mac if it falls from that height...

Sorry to hijack the thread. Would a SSD help the performance of parallels or VM ware in OSX?Other than booting faster that is..How significant the improvement would be? I couldn't find much comment about this, so any idea?

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I can vouch for this personally...
I'm a software developer who, at any point in time, is juggling development projects with multiple clients. Each client runs in its own Linux or Windows VM under Parallels 6. My 24gb MacPro can handle this without skipping a beat. But, I also need to be able to take the whole show on the road when I visit client sites. Since the Macbook Pro maxes out at 8gb, swap performance becomes a major issue on the boot drive. In addition, because I'm running compiles and builds all the time, with multiple database instances, random access speed also becomes a MAJOR factor. Fortunately, SSD excels at all of this...

I currently run my VMs off an external drive... the http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Newer Technology/GM8QMSSD400/ which is two 200gb OWC RAID SSDs. On my MacPro, it's connected via eSata. When I'm on the road, it's bus powered via FW800 off my MBPro. It's a great product! There is an OWC 240GB SSD running inside my MBPro as the boot drive.

The whole setup runs like a freaking dream... without skipping a beat. Full builds of my projects take well under a minute in both environments. And, I have a portable setup that also still runs super fast on my MacPro setup when I'm home.

Really really impressive... and I couldn't ever imagine going back to the portable hell I was dealing with before...

Ergo everybody who doesn't run a couple of VMs but still enough to page out with 4gigs can save the money for 8 gigs if he has a SSD.
That could be added to the Benefits of SSDs. The money you don't have to spend on more ram somewhat justifies the price SSD unless you need a mobile workstation of course.

Staff Member

All it takes is for Apple to adopt them as standard (you know they will before anyone else) and if you want a mac you'll have to pay for it.

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I can't see Apple offering SSD only Macs until the prices are fair and they can offer decent capacities. Currently they could replace HDs with 64GB SSDs which would be ridiculous. It works in MBA as it has never had much storage and is very limited computer in other aspects as well. For MBP which is Apple's flagship, going from 500GB to anything less than 256GB would be stupid.

Macs are already expensive so no need to charge 1999$ for Mac Mini just because of an SSD. 100$ price increase is still possible, maybe even 200$ but anything over that would be too much. Apple also loves the profit.

And your statement made it sound like all HDs will be replaced, not just in Macs.

Macs are already expensive so no need to charge 1999$ for Mac Mini just because of an SSD. 100$ price increase is still possible, maybe even 200$ but anything over that would be too much. Apple also loves the profit.

And your statement made it sound like all HDs will be replaced, not just in Macs.

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I would love for SSDs to be available in stock configuration for the Mini (AND make it as easy as the RAM). Maybe I'm being a wussy, though even though I know someone who can put an OWC in now, my two fears are... the drive or another portion is going to fail and Apple won't cover it or it'll get lost in the mail.

I don't think it will take that long. We're under $2/GB for some SSDs now. Just because you can get a 2TB HDD doesn't mean you need one. I think once 256GB drives get to $250 and 512MB drives get to $500 we'll start seeing them become standard in mainstream notebooks, and not just from Apple. The performance boost is significant.

People will need to unlearn some habits, though (no more "defragmenting," for instance).

Staff Member

I don't think it will take that long. We're under $2/GB for some SSDs now. Just because you can get a 2TB HDD doesn't mean you need one. I think once 256GB drives get to $250 and 512MB drives get to $500 we'll start seeing them become standard in mainstream notebooks, and not just from Apple. The performance boost is significant.

People will need to unlearn some habits, though (no more "defragmenting," for instance).

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Mainstream laptops usually cost ~500-800$ so it will take awhile before SSDs are cheap enough to be put in those (assuming there will be no dramatic change in the price of other components). At 1$/GB, SSDs may be cheap enough to be standard in premium computers (possibly Macs), but I can't see a 500$ SSD in 700$ computer, makes no sense at all.

You have to remember that companies don't want to cut their profits because of SSDs as profit is everything they care about. If 500GB HD can be had for 50$, they won't replace that with 256GB SSD that costs 300$ without raising the final price.

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